Nick Glover

There’s been a lot of hype about Apple’s latest gadget, and, especially on the technology blogs (here’s lookin’ at you, Gizmodo), a lot of posts about how it’s going to change everything. I will concede that it will change one thing: bringing tablet computers to the masses. Beyond that, it is probably the most limited-use piece of technology I can think of. It has a 1 GHz processor, no better than, say, the Nexus One. It’s probably got a better video card, but in the end, it can’t really do much of anything the Nexus One can’t do. Or the iPhone, for that matter. It’s basically just a big smartphone, though they are putting iWork on it (does anyone actually use iWork?). The problem with that is that you can’t stick it in your pocket, so it’s not nearly as useful as a smartphone. Ok, but it can have 3G, so maybe it’s more like a netbook, you say. Except the iPad is more expensive, can’t multitask, and can’t access Flash. It’s slightly more portable than a netbook, but considerably less useful. Hell, it’s not even as useful as an average Windows tablet because those run actual Windows, so you can do whatever you want instead of being locked in to whatever Apple deems appropriate for it. I’m sure the iPad is a fine piece of hardware, but the software makes it utterly impractical for anything. It’s time people had a reality check and realized that.

In case you couldn’t tell, I’m in a bit of an anti-Apple mood right now (not that my points are any less valid) because my iPod decided to die on me after only two years or so. The battery was completely fine a week ago, then, one day, it just decided to completely run out. Generally speaking, batteries are supposed to gradually lose their charging ability, so I’m not sure exactly what went wrong (maybe they program it to stop working after two years). I don’t have the money to get it fixed or get a new one, so I decided to put my music on my phone instead. That meant using new software. New software is fine, except that iTunes does such a horrible job of tagging everything that it was an enormous task just fixing the mess it made. Using Media Monkey (which, by the way, is awesome), I discovered a good number of my tunes had no tags at all and most (if not all) of the songs have duplicate album art within the file, which is probably why some people (myself and a friend included) see random album art on their iPod on songs that show the correct art in iTunes. Unfortunately, Media Monkey doesn’t work on my Mac, so I guess I’ll be managing my library on my desktop from now on.